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Flipping through the jazz records at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, producer Kye Potter discovered a worn cassette by musician Jessica Williams. It looked like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had come off the tape," he notes. "It was copied at home, with xeroxed liners, a dab of fluorescent marker to accentuate the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector particularly interested in the avant-garde movement post John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared out of character for Williams, who was best known for producing lively jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the West Coast scene knew her as a musical experimenter – during her performances, she requested pianos without the cover to facilitate to access the interior and pluck the strings – it was a aspect that seldom found its way on her releases.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to see if any more recordings were available. She responded with four recordings of modified piano from the 1980s – two live, two made in the studio. And though she had long since retired previously, she also enclosed some contemporary pieces. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 synth tapes – full releases," Potter explains.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams throughout the pandemic to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was released in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, midway through the project. She was 73. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter reveals. Williams had been public about her struggles after spinal surgery in 2012, which ended her ability to tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "Yet I feel her character, fortitude, assurance and the serenity she found through meditative practices all came out in conversation."

In later electronic, groove-focused releases such as Blood Music (2008) – explicitly categorized "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a artist attempting to escape expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano reverberations, demonstrates that that impulse extended back decades. Rather than a consistent piano sound, the instrument creates many different sonic impressions: what could be hammered dulcimers, Indonesian percussion, far-off chimes, creatures in enclosures, and tiny engines sparking to life. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with colossal bellows dissolving into snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. Jessika Kenney, who has partnered with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was attracted to the power of her music, but knew little of her dreamlike prepared piano until this release. Shortly after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Today, that appears completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Historical Influences

Williams’ prepared sounds have artistic antecedents: consider John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the groundbreaking approaches of American eccentric Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how successfully she fuses these novel textures with her own soulful language at the keyboard. The stylistic approach rarely departs from that which she honed in a body of work spanning more than 80 albums, meaning the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are driven by the effervescent force of an artist in complete command. This is electrifying music.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Williams consistently explored the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she reportedly said. She was given her first home piano in 1954. In her writings, she shared the anecdote of her first "disassembling" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she wrote: Williams removed a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor beside her stool. "I needed a drummer, and that left foot became the hi-hat foot," she explained.

Williams originally learned classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Initial experiences with the classical repertoire led her to Rachmaninov; she took his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who chastised her for altering a section. Yet he recognized her potential: the next week, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

Subsequently, Brubeck call Williams "one of the greatest pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was just as awed. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, shows her deep immersion in jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. Nevertheless, despite her extensive studies to educate herself the genre – first, to the more modern styles of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before working her way back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she soon grew disenchanted with the jazz world.

Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Buoyed up by the veteran's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she turned into a forceful, open critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, the jazz "boys’ club," the "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of landing performances – and of a commercial business riding on the coattails of financially strained musicians.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she wrote in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, unflinching, expressly political and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a transgender woman. A commentator observed: "To add to the sexism … that chased her from her chosen artistic field for a period, imagine what kind of cruel nonsense she must have suffered as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

Williams’ career evolved into self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint in the active Bay Area scene, she relocated to smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, settling in Portland in 1991, and later relocating to an even quieter place, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams understood from the beginning the immense possibilities of the internet